(Series 16, ep.37) You know when a love triangle is reaching critical mass. It’s when every corner of the triangle gets a haircut the very same week, which was the case for the Smug/Posh/Barfs in this episode. It’s like some sort of adultery telepathy. Dr Amy Smug-Barf was still covering for Posh’s mistake the other week, because she needs to get him moved on to another department and can only do that if everybody thinks he’s competent and he passes all his tests.

So far so Smug. And Posh. What it all needed was a hefty dollop of brains-speak and a Big Reveal (and then more brains-speak). That’s exactly what we got, but in the capable scriptwriting hands of Nick Fisher it was quirky, funny and very dramatic.

AAU Patient of the Week was an ice cream man who’d been shot in the face by a crossbow bolt (still in situ when he rolled up in the car park and Posh attempted to buy a 99 from him). The patient seemed quite blasé about his injury. “You got shot in the face!” Posh repeatedly exclaimed. “It’s not ideal, granted,” was the reply.

Dominic has been fairly quiet for a few weeks, but the crossbow incident also gave us a delightful reminder of just what a beautifully twisted soul he is beneath his cute exterior. “If someone shot me in the face with a crossbow I wouldn’t want them to get into trouble till I’d had a chance to shoot them. In the face. With a crossbow,” he said.

Big praise also to the prosthetics department, who must have been proud of their work with the crossbow/face case. Thoroughly, yuckily convincing.

But back to the Triangle of Doom. Raf was suspicious of the way Amy’s story about the disciplinary incident differed from Posh’s. I can’t help thinking it wasn’t in the best interests of the patient to interrogate Posh about it while he was trying to remove the crossbow bolt from the man’s face (“Gently… in an anticlockwise direction”). Despite this pressure, Posh did good work and some beautifully neat stitching, which was ruined moments later by the ice cream man’s wife’s fingernails, because he’d been seeing her hairdresser on the side (the crossbow bolt had been delivered by the hairdresser’s husband).

By this time, Raf had managed to get Amy to confess about her night of lust (“Twice” – TMI) with Posh. It’s fair to say Raf didn’t take the news well – particularly the realisation that the baby might not be his. There was a lot of brain-speaking going on when he took the ice cream man off to have his face fixed again. “I’ll do my best to repair it, but it’s never going to be pretty.”

Something else that’s not going to be pretty, and indeed will quite possibly be heartbreaking, is finding out What’s The Matter With Elliot. He’s a worried man, and even the lure of a doughnut couldn’t tempt him out of his lab, where he’s busy tinkering with the Herzig Whatever Number He’s Up To Now.

He popped out for Pot Noodles in the Linden Cullen Memorial Shrubbery and fancied he could hear a sea shanty. He wasn’t hallucinating, though – he really could hear a sea shanty, as a posse of singing sailors had found a parking space in the ever-accommodating car park and one of them was preparing to check into Darwin. Mo and Adele thought the man had taken Viagra,because there was something he wasn’t telling them and it was embarrassing him, but Elliot took him out to the LCMS for a man-to-man chat and it turned out it was Botox, because he didn’t want to look wrinkly on telly. It was all a good excuse for a brains-speak about ignoring symptoms, and Elliot booked himself in for a MRI scan. The results worried him, but we still don’t know What’s The Matter With Elliot. At the end of the episode he was hearing piercing ringing noises, like the kind that always made Captain Kirk and the crew clap their hands over their ears and run side to side on Star Trek. I bet Digby knows what I mean.

Speaking of whom, Digby is on a roll as far as wooing the ladies is concerned. This week another attractive geeky gal crossed his path in the form of Marieka, who had a dog that was capable of sniffing out C. difficile. He’d been exposed to thousands of stool samples (“And I thought I had a rubbish job,” said Colette, who wasn’t keen on having a dog on one of her spotlessly clean wards – until the dog spotted some C. diff).

Colette was preoccupied anyway, because she’d noticed that the linen cupboard was sometimes locked, sometimes not – and when it was locked, Zosia and Uncle Jesse were nowhere to be seen. She decided to give Jesse a warning about what Selfie would do if/when he discovered what was going on. This was delivered in her best “Exterminate! Exterminate!” voice, but telling Jesse how Selfie would rip off his man-parts etc didn’t sound as threatening as if she’d simply reminded him that Selfie was Killer Karl from Corrie.

Next time: Smug/Posh/Barf; Jesse tries to heed Colette’s warning; What Even Is The Matter With Elliot Though?; and MR T!!!!

7 responses to “Holby City: Nice hair, shame about the adultery”

I thought this episode was dire. I only watched for Elliot’s story but that wasn’t enough to get me to sit through the entire thing. I went to make a cuppa, only tuning in again near the end unfortunately just in time for Raf’s ridiculous “crying”. I won’t be watching again until the Smug/Barf/Posh story is over and done with. It’s atrocious nonsense.

Biggest mystery to me is why Selfie hasn’t sent Connie up to Darwin to do the job she’s trained for now that Jac has gone absent. When she left Holby she was one of Europe’s Leading Cardiothoracic Surgeons. What has happened since to have her retrained (or is she?) in A&E? Is it another Mystery Disease?

I think we should be told.

Best thing I’ve heard all week is that Mary Claire is on her way back.

I thought that was one of the worst episodes in quite some time. I also only tuned in for Elliot’s story but perhaps I don’t like Elliot as much as I thought if it requires sitting through the Smug/Barf/Posh drivel.
The Keller story made no sense – luckily they didn’t appear to have any patients to treat (aside from Miss C dif). Colette’s warning was hilarious but I’m not entirely sure that’s what they were aiming for? It’s difficult to tell with Colette.
The only mildly redeeming moments in this episode were Dominic’s brief scenes. The rest felt like it was thrown in simply to pad out a Smug/Barf/Posh episode. If that story doesn’t end swiftly with the removal of at least two characters I think I’ll be switching off for good :(